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Queer Theory, Lacanian Psychoanalysis, Sexual Politics: From Norm to Desire

Author(s) : Luiz Valle Junior

Reviews and Endorsements

Has queer theory started showing its age? Has what appeared once to be radical, subversive, transformative, become, nowadays, commonplace, accommodating – in short, ordinary? Luiz Valle Junior examines the limitations of queer theory’s canon, in particular queer misreadings of Lacan (including Judith Butler) and identifies the blindspots that led to its impasses. Sexuality, as Valle bluntly reminds us, however outrageous, is not political in and of itself. The result of Valle’s patient excavations is a Lacanian theoretical scaffold that, like a patient analyst, works through the libidinal consequences of capitalist, scientific modernity: it reframes and starts responding to Freud’s famous question: ‘what do queers want?’ with a political economy of sexuality that is centred on desire and enjoyment rather than on identity and normativity. A must-read for everyone interested in Lacan and queer theory alike.
Maria Aristodemou, Professor Emerita; author, Law, Psychoanalysis, Society: Taking the Unconscious Seriously

In his book, Lacan, Queer Theory, Sexual Politics: From Norm to Desire, Luiz Valle Junior risks tackling questions both delicate and thorny – hallmarks of the desire that animates them – in language that is deliberately accessible. The effect is riveting. Placing Jacques Lacan in conversation with Judith Butler, Lee Edelman, José Estéban Muñoz, Guy Hocquenghem, Immanuel Kant, Karl Marx, and Donatien Alphonse François de Sade, Valle writes a new history of Lacanian psychoanalysis, queer theory, and LGBT+ movements, loosening up these fields by intervening in them without fealty to any master or maxim. Calling on analysts to critique their theory and practice, as well as the social links they participate in, Valle underscores that analytic formation lasts a lifetime. And pushing queer theory beyond the normative/antinormative binary, Valle upholds the place of desire and its impossible object. Thanks to Valle’s intervention, we can approach with renewed curiosity and concern what follows from asserting that Lacanian clinics have sexual politics, avowed or not; the role clinicians and analysts have with respect to the use of analytic theory and practice towards reactionary ends; and the question of where and how the subject and the social touch and the effects of that encounter.
Dr. Shanna Carlson de la Torre, author, Sex for Structuralists: The Non-Oedipal Logics of Femininity and Psychosis; candidate-analyst, Lacan School of Psychoanalysis

Luiz Valle Junior’s conceptual reorientation of queer theory and psychoanalysis resets the terms for the discussion of capitalism's libidinal reality that we need to be having today. With remarkably clear and compelling prose, he demonstrates how each field addresses an impasse in the other.
Professor Jodi Dean, author, Democracy and Other Neoliberal Fantasies

Rousing readers from the twin slumbers induced by opaque Lacanianism and accepted orthodoxies of how psychoanalysis engages Queer Theory, Lacan, Queer Theory, Sexual Politics effectively remakes the field, energizing how we should read a properly Lacanian contribution to LGBTQIA+ politics (and, for sure, a properly Queer critique of Lacanianism). Rarely is so much critical vitality apparent in a single volume, spoken so forthrightly, so clearly. One cannot put this book down without feeling politically energized, freed of critical dogmas and willing to consider once again the radical role of desire and enjoyment in thinking the terrain of sexuality.
Derek Hook, Duquesne University; editor (with Calum Neill and Stijn Vanheule), Reading Lacan’s Écrits: From ‘Overture to this Collection’ to ‘Presentation on Psychical Causality’